Hello everyone!
VR Sketch 24.0 has been released.
What is new in this version:
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the smoove tool from SketchUp’s sandbox tools has been implemented! It is a tool to make terrains or other smooth shapes. Like in SketchUp, you first need to make a surface with the required subdivisions, e.g. a 10 by 10 grid of squares. Then you apply “smooving” to it to move the vertices by a variable amount. In VR Sketch, this tool is actually a submode of the standard Move tool (in the context menu, you can switch between Copy, Move, and now Smoove).
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built-in model editor: on standalone Quest/Pico Neo, you can edit models locally with no connection. Various fixes have been done since the introduction of that feature in the previous version. We also added the ability to export models made this way to COLLADA (.dae) files. The whole local editing is still experimental, and the .dae files are saved locally on the Quest/Pico Neo and must then be manually copied off the device. See our new documentation page.
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scenes created in VR (in the settings, Scenes page) now record the scale, too. Scenes created from SketchUp continue to use the default 1:1 scale when we visit them in VR. (Note: SketchUp’s undo is known not to play nice with scenes, so don’t rely on it in this case!)
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the “position model in space” command was moved. It used to be in the teleport’s context menu. It is now in the settings, in the Scenes page.
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after you use lock axis or lock plane in tools like Move or the Pencil, you can now point towards the wished end point on that axis or plane, by aiming the controller. It is not precise, but for quickly moving or drawing to a far-away point, it should be good enough. It is notably useful in cases where you can’t easily move the whole model around: for example, when you are using the passthrough and are trying to draw a virtual wall up to the real ceiling’s height. In that situation, you can now start drawing the rectangle, pick “lock plane” in the menu to lock it to the vertical plane, then step back and point to the ceiling.
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related to the previous point, you can now more generally “lock” lines and planes that are not aligned to the axes. Also, the lock icon doesn’t show after you lock by using the menu (as opposed to locking by point-and-click with the other controller). This is because in that case, the lock icon could get in the way of things you want to see in your model.
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in the Move tool, when you move along an axis, the actual distance of the movement is rounded; but the floating number that shows the distance was displaying a non-rounded number. This was a bug introduced in the previous version of VR Sketch. Fixed.
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in the Rotate tool, the plane of rotation switched too easily between the various choices when all we did was trying to rotate by a few degrees only. This should be better now. For the cases where it is still not sufficient, there is also a new menu command called lock rotation plane.
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we might have fixed an issue on Quest devices: sometimes (rarely), at startup the controllers were shown and appeared to work but the buttons were all unresponsive.
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in some PC’s localization settings, the decimal symbol is comma instead of dot. In that case, VR Sketch might display and expect a comma in numbers typed in the distance numpad. But the numpad itself only has a dot key. The intention was to use the dot convention systematically in VR Sketch, independently on the locale. For some reason it didn’t always work. Hopefully we fixed it now. If something else broke because of that (e.g. the sorting order of file names in some “file open” dialog box), please report it.
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bug fix: after snap turning with the joystick (with the teleport tool), a few internal updates were missing—most importantly, the skybox was not reoriented, if you use a custom skybox.
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scenes in SketchUp can hide some of the geometry when we click on them. More precisely, that’s restricted to: (1) top-level faces, edges, and groups and components; (2) since SketchUp 2020, any sub-group or sub-component instance anywhere else. The hidden status of “(2)”, i.e. sub-groups and sub-component instances, was not correctly updated from SketchUp to VR Sketch.
Enjoy!